上海：速度的代价

The most common photograph of Shanghai is taken from the Bund, looking east.

A row of early twentieth-century stone buildings stands behind you; across the water is the cluster of Pudong skyscrapers, and after dark the whole skyline starts changing colour.

The photograph is very useful, because it compresses a complicated city into one easily grasped sentence: the old is on this side, the new is on that side.

The trouble is that while the sentence isn't false, it explains almost nothing.

If you want to know what the relationship between these two banks actually is, the cheapest method is to spend two yuan on the ferry.

The ferry is municipal transport; the fare is the same as a bus.

At morning rush hour the deck is packed with commuters, delivery riders and people wheeling bicycles.

They keep their heads down over their phones, entirely uninterested in the skyline on either side.

For them this is simply crossing the river.

The crossing takes a dozen minutes, and in it you pass through two upheavals spanning nearly two centuries of Shanghai's history.

The Bund on the west bank was built between the end of the nineteenth century and the 1930s.

That row of buildings belonged at the time to banks, trading houses, insurance companies and newspaper offices.

Shanghai in that period was one of the most important treaty ports in the Far East, with foreign capital, compradors and local merchants all operating on the same street.

The architectural styles came from Europe, the drawings from foreign firms, and the construction was carried out by Chinese craftsmen.

Calling this stretch of history simply "glorious" or simply "humiliating" leaves out an enormous amount of detail.

It contains trade, wealth, unequal treaties and the migration of a great many ordinary people, all at once.

Pudong on the east bank was, before 1990, mainly farmland, wharves, warehouses and small factories.

There is a widely repeated Shanghai saying: better a bed in Puxi than a room in Pudong.

In 1990 the state announced the development of Pudong, and over the following thirty-odd years a financial district, an airport, a metro network and a set of supertall buildings appeared on that land.

So the difference between the two banks of the Huangpu isn't only a matter of sequence in time.

It records two openings of different character: one led by outside capital, one driven by state planning.

Once you see that, the phrase "new versus old" starts to look far too crude.

In the afternoon I left the riverside and walked into a longtang in the old town.

The longtang is a housing form particular to Shanghai: a main lane leads inward, flanked by tightly packed rows of two- and three-storey terraced houses.

Through most of the twentieth century, one such building often held several households.

Kitchens and bathrooms were shared, bamboo laundry poles projected horizontally from the windows, and there was almost no privacy between neighbours.

Walk in today and you'll see several states existing simultaneously.

Some houses are still occupied by their original residents, mostly elderly.

Some have been converted into cafés, boutiques and guesthouses, with tourists photographing the doorways.

And whole districts have been demolished, the original residents relocated to newly built estates beyond the outer ring.

In one lane I talked for a while with an older woman.

She had lived there more than forty years.

I asked whether she would be willing to move, and her answer was far more complex than I had expected.

She began with a list of drawbacks: small rooms, cold winters, an inconvenient bathroom, a roof that leaks in the rain.

Then she said she knows every single person in the lane.

After moving into a new estate the flat would certainly be larger, but she might not exchange more than a few sentences with a neighbour in a year.

She said that when people discuss old housing, they usually discuss only the housing itself.

What is genuinely hard to reproduce is the relationships built up between people over a long time; once they are broken apart, they are very hard to grow again.

That remark made me look at the contrast between the Bund and Pudong differently.

We are used to telling Shanghai as a story about speed: a new city raised in thirty years.

The speed is real, and so is the achievement.

But speed always has a cost, and the cost is usually not distributed evenly — it lands on particular families and particular blocks.

Whether a city's heritage protection is any good can't be judged only by how many buildings were restored; it also depends on whether the life that was there still has a place.

At dusk I went back to the river.

The lights on the far bank began to shift, sightseeing boats passed one after another, and the people holding up phones formed a solid line along the bank.

I thought of what the woman had said.

Skyscrapers are for people to look at; longtang are for people to live in.

Both statements hold, and the real difficulty is how a city accommodates both.

Shanghai's current approach is to designate historic conservation areas while continuing to redevelop elsewhere.

How well it works depends on the specific street, the specific building, the specific household — it's hard to sum up in one sentence.

Before leaving, I took the ferry once more.

The same two yuan, the same dozen minutes.

The first time I rode it, I thought I was travelling from the old city to the new one.

The second time, I realized these two banks are the same city making two choices under different historical conditions.

Reading them as opposites makes you miss the continuity between them.

If you only had one day, would you go up the six-hundred-metre observation deck and look down over the city, or walk a lane that might not exist in a few years?